Vilnius Diary 7

Jurga Ivanauskaite is a cult figure in Lithuania. Born in 1961, the writer died young in 2007 leaving behind her a strong reputation as a writer with star quality, a writer who did not only write beautiful books and poems but who was also a political activist. A controversial personality who got into trouble when she took part in demonstrations against the Chinese oppression of Tibet, the country she travelled to and lived in for a long time.

A film has been made about Jurga Ivanauskaite, whose books have been translated into several languages. A good film that combines in a fine way public and private archive material – with methaphoric imagery (the title, see below) and pieces of read poetry, in other words – this film is a fine intro to a very charismatic Lithuanian writer, who passed away far too early.

Dance in the Desert. Lithuania, 2009, 71 mins. Director: Agne Marcinkeviciute. Producer Zivile Gallego

http://www.booksfromlithuania.lt/index.php?page_id=20

http://www.fralita.com/news.html

Vurdering:

Vilnius Diary 6

I was on a tour today. A magnificent tour. To the place of a film to come, and to the people who are characters in this work under development. It may sound like a kliché film, one of many about poor people, but what cameraman and director Mindaugas Survali has done is completely different and quite unique. For more than a year he has followed people who live in the forest next to a dumping ground, where they picked food and found metal pieces that they could sell on the market. Around 500 people were here and I am writing in past time as the dumping ground was closed March 2008, leaving very few people to stay.

Mindaugas has visited the people regularly since the closing and the 7 men and women, we met on our small excursion to the place outside Vilnius welcomed him warmly and showed generously filmmaker Audrius Stonys and me, how they lived with kitchen, living room, sleeping room, a lot of empty bottles, cats and dogs under the blue sky. With winter heating possibilities.

Earlier today we had – with filmmaker and in this case also producer Giedre  Beinoriute – seen some edited scenes from the material of the film, that has the working title, ”The Field of Magic”. Excellent situations with characters beautifully shot over all seasons, small wonderful and touching stories that show the dignity of the dump people, who have chosen or have been pushed by destiny to choose to live a life outside the so-called normality. It will be a film made with heart and cinematic skills.

www.docuinter.net

http://www.monoklis.lt/

http://www.kinas.gamtoj.com/

Vilnius Diary 5

Iranian Documentarians Protest

Vilnius Diary 4

One of the participants at the workshop, Italian Davide Mastropaolo, asked me for advice on a film that a friend had made with himself involved as co-producer. The film is about to be finished but – have you heard about that before? – the filmmakers has run out of money for a film that they have basically financed themselves.

I saw the approx. 80 minutes long totally professional film about the Gaza Hospital in Beirut that now is a ruin where Palestinian refugees live a tough life. But that is not the story that director Marco Pasquini wants to convey. At least not the main story that is being told by some great foreign women, who worked at this PLO hospital in Lebanon in the beginning of the 80’es and did their surgeries on survivors of the massacre in the refugee camp Sabra and Chatila. In the film the women are brought back to Beirut to what was once the hospital they lived and worked in. To give us their experience with precision and emotion.

The film is thus about past and present, the past brought to us through fantastic archive material from the time of the massacre and later on in the 80’es, where the hospital stopped to work at the moment of the start of the Lebanese civil war. Readers of filmkommentaren.dk may have read my sceptical comments on ”Waltz with Bashir” that takes place at the same time and at the same place, seen from an Israeli soldier’s pov. This Italian film is for me much richer in content, a classical beautifully shot documentary. Please finish it and get it to the audience.

Photo: The barber in the film, another fine character.

Link to Cinema Italiano info&news

Vilnius Diary 3

I showed a clip from ”Citizen Havel” yesterday here at the Summer Film Academy in Lithuania, as an example of how important it is to have access and to have time to follow a character, who is known widely by the public. I compared with ”Primary” by Leacock and Robert Drew, about John F. Kennedy, and ”War Room” by Pennebaker about the campaign to get Clinton to the White House.

And I praised the work of Pavel Koutecky who filmed Havel for 12 years and the work of Mira Janek, who took over when Koutecky died tragically before the film was finished.

Vaclav Havel as a character in the film... amazing... Vaclav Havel as a film director, needs to be seen, have a look at the website below where it is announced that Havel goes for direction of films!

http://cineuropa.org/index.aspx?lang=en
http://www.summermediastudio.com/

Vilnius Diary 2

Vilnius Diary 1

Hubert Sauper: Darwin’s Nightmare

This brief intro comes because a documentary neo-classic is broadcast on Danish television tonight, on DR2 in prime time (8.40pm). It has been in Danish cinemas, it is available from the DFI, and if you have already seen it, take another look. The film is avaiIable on dvd from several sources. I shift to Danish and quote the Danish newspaper Weekendavisen:

"DET var for film som Darwin’s Nightmare, at Vorherre skabt dokumentargenren. Hubert Saupers billedessay er en forfærdende, intenst ubehagelig og på godt og ondt uforglemmelig rapport fra et sted, Lake Victoria i Tanzania, hvor evolutionen har frembragt et regulært mareridt. Overordnet er området hærget af krige og etniske konflikter, som har varet så længe og er blevet så uoverskuelige, at man fra mediernes side har opgivet at følge ordentligt med. Som Sauper påpeger: »Alene i det østlige Congo er antallet af krigsofre på en enkelt dag lige så stort som den 11. september i New York.«"
"Det er en skelsættende og uafrystelig film, som demonstrerer at dokumentargenren for længst har givet fiktionen baghjul, når det gælder om at flytte holdninger og skabe opinion om en sag."

www.dfi.dk

www.dr.dk/dokumania

Maziar Bahari arrested in Tehran

Bul(garian)doc Films and Humour

... will be very much present at this year’s edition (number 20!) of the Sunny Side of the Doc. A so-called Bulgarian umbrella has been established to promote the films and projects that come from a country with several fine films from recent years. Initiator is the production company Agitprop represented by Martichka Bozhilova and Anna Stoeva, who are there to serve customers with Buldoc, ”a non-fiction kitchen”, together with other producers, the local MEDIA Desk and the national television. A presentation will be made of the new Balkan Documentary Center with this logline:

Is the Balkan documentary sector heading for roofless cars or roofless houses?

Photo from one of Agitprop’s masterpieces, ”Mosquito Problems and Other Stories” by Andrey Paounov.

http://www.sunnysideofthedoc.com/fr/

http://www.bdcwebsite.com/

http://www.themosquitoproblem.com

Ex Oriente 4 Directing

Ex Oriente 3 Directing

Italian director Alessandro Rossetto came to Hotel Biograf to show his 1999 documentary Bibione Bye Bye One, which is a wonderful b/w 75 minutes long journey into an area and a culture that the director knows from his childhood, 100 kilometres north of Venice.

In a very inspiring talk after the film, Rossetto told how he had been filming over three summers with 2 hours of 16mm material in the first summer, 6 in the next and 3 in the last. He had already edited a one hour version after the two summers of shooting but was not happy with the result returning to the summer resort to catch scenes that he knew he wanted. 5 years before the shooting of the film, Rossetto had done his research by doing 2 years of photographing people and situations. The film is indeed about people, showing faces, built through small stories with characters that are caught with the tenderness that the director kept on saying that he went for. To lose time can be a richness for a project, he said, urging the workshop participants to ”protect” their first idea of a film, it could have a deepness that you can not explain. And waiting please, waiting is important, just stay there and you become a character as the others, the man with the camera. And thus you get what you want.

The film is for me a neo-classic, reminding me about Lindsay Anderson’s O Dreamland with an absolutely great camerawork where you feel that you are drawn into a world that you don’t know and at the same time feel good to be in, accompanied by music that stress atmosphere and timelessness. Robert Frank has been mentioned as a photographic inspiration for the film from Bibione.

www.docuinter.net

www.docvideo.it/catalogo/

Ex Oriente 2 Sales

Ex Oriente 1 – Production

Helge Albers represents the Flying Moon Filmproduktion based in Germany. A company that started 10 years ago and produces fiction as well as feature length documentaries. Albers gave the Ex Oriente participants a brief intro to the documentary history of a company that has been very much orientated towards a theatrical distribution. With success:

The first example shown was the film by Uli Gaulke, ”Havana, mi amor” (photo), that came after ”Buena Vista Social Club” profiting from the huge interest in Cuba. The film had 60.000 tickets sold in the cinemas and gave the company a profit of around 30.000€. The same director made later on the ”Comrades in Dreams” that became a festival hit but a cinema flop. Nevertheless the company has a focus on theatrical release and added a distribution branch to its activities which gave a sensational good result with the film ”Full Metal Village” (director Korean Sung-Hyung Cho) that made 190.000 cinema tickets on the basis of first 16 and later 53 prints. The film had no television support on board up front with a budget of around 200.000€.

Albers said that the dvd distribution of this film, supplemented by a good income from festival fees was financially much more interesting than the vod (video on demand) that he was much more sceptical towards. Saying that people normally connects internet to something that is for free.

www.flyingmoon.com

www.docuinter.net

Bananas

Free Thought Documentaries in Moscow

Capturing Reality 2

The NFB (National Film Board of Canada) production on the art of documentary, featuring 33 directors from 13 countries, are being used for debates among filmmakers and with the audience. Here is a quote from a Realscreen article illustrating the never-ending-discussion:

…One of the most conflicting sequences in the film concerned the ethics of documentary filmmaking and how much of a film can be scripted or pre-planned. For instance, in a segment about interviewing subjects, Nick Broomfield (photo) says that he sees a habit has formed with directors who come into subjects' homes or workspaces and move around their furniture and light the space a certain way to get the optimum effect. While he thinks this is destroying their environment and essentially losing the truth in the situation, Errol Morris admits he's done it and he stands behind it.

Likewise, director Barry Stevens uses Werner Herzog's Little Dieter Needs to Fly as an example of fudging the truth. He says that Herzog asked his subject, a man who had been in the Navy, to open and close his front door a number of times to illustrate his need to feel like he's not locked in. While Stevens says it made a strong image in the film, he also feels it wasn't true. While some people might say 'don't let the facts get in the way of a good story,' Stevens believes that when it comes to documentaries, you absolutely should let them get in the way…

http://www.realscreen.com/articles/news/20090611/capturingreality.html

http://www3.nfb.ca/webextension/capturing-reality/

Petr Lom: Letters to the President

Den korte udgave af Petr Loms film fra Iran bliver vist i aften på DR2 under den danske titel "Breve til præsident Ahmadinejad". Den er fin at se, selvom jeg klart foretrækker den lange udgave, som blev anmeldt på filmkommentaren.dk sådan her.

Petr Lom's film "Letters to the President", short version is being shown on Danish DR2 prime time, 8pm. Here is the review of the film that is also to be shown in Donegal in the coming days, see below:

Guth Gafa: One More Documentary Oasis

Capturing Reality

33 filmmakers, 13 countries, 1 passion: The art of documentary. This is the way that NFB, National Film Board of Canada, launches its interview-film that includes great filmmakers like Maysles, Kim Longinotto, Werner Herzog (photo), Molly Dineen, Heddy Honigmann and Stan Neumann. I did not have the chance to watch it at the idfa 2008 but the clip on youtube, see below, looks promising.

One little thing, however, where are the filmmakers from the Nordic countries? Jørgen Leth and Jon Bang Carlsen from Denmark, Stefan Jarl and PeÅ Holmquist from Sweden, Pirjo Honkasalo from Finland, Margaret Ohlin from Norway – not to talk about some names from the Eastern part of Europe: Herz Frank, Viktor Kossakovski, Sergey Dvortsevoy, Mira Janek, Marcel Lozinski...

There is room for a follow-up of this fine initiative.

http://www3.nfb.ca/webextension/capturing-reality/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPavxiKKT2w&feature=PlayList&p=8295162E814D62B8&index=0

Tiananmen June 1989

I suppose that all public broadcasters have put a focus on the massacre on the Tiananmen Square in Beijing 20 years ago. A taboo in Chinese history, it is simply forbidden to mention it in Chinese media, channels like arte have made available interesting interviews with surviving witnesses and activists from the Democratic Movement in 1989, brutally knocked down and for several of the interviewees with year-long imprisonment as a consequence of their involvement.

The interviews are part of the web-series of arte, made for the strand ”arte reportage”.  

http://www.arte.tv/fr

Herbert Tobias

Born in 1924 (died in 1982) German photographer Herbert Tobias was sent to the Ostfront as a soldier when only 19 years old. In the exhibition in Hamburg a series of photos documents how it was for a young man, still a teenager, to be where tragedy reigns before your eyes. ”Dirt, lice and Exhaustion”, he calls one of the motives from Russia. The exhibition is big and divided into themes and styles, in documentary language both observational and staged. Fashion photography. Street motives, moments of magic. A range of Berlin photos from the 50’es, ruins and more ruins, how was it possible to rebuild this city? Staged and unstaged erotic and for the post-war period provocative homosexual tableaux.

Impressive exhibiton that stays until August 16 at the Haus der Photographie, Deichtorhallen, Hamburg. Beautiful hall. Photo: Klaus Kinski and Thomas Harlan, actor and writer taken by Tobias

http://www.deichtorhallen.de/

http://www.herberttobias.com/bio.html

De Gerlache: Magritte, le jour et la nuit

A museum for René Magritte has opened in Brussels and as the cultural channel of Europe, arte celebrates this important event. But how to make a film about an artist, whose oeuvre was huge, an artist who behaved like a good bourgeois without any scandals attached and without any wish to come up with any easy interpretations. And yet such an influential artist for current filmmakers and designers and other visual artists who claimed or claim to be in line with the surrealist thinking. How?

The director’s answer to these questions was to introduce an actor as the one, who walks around where Magritte was, in his footsteps, watching and talking to people who knew him or his wife Georgette. For biographical documentation and artistic interpretation. It is sometimes made in an elegant way, and sometimes the image manipulations are clumsy. Basically you do not get anything new to know about Magritte, or a better understanding and feeling. It is all very staged with the actor and his trying to make the painter alive, and it helps when small home film material clips with Magritte are shown. All of a sudden you are touched by a playfullness without pretentions in sequences that are for me killed by a wall-to-wall narration in first person delivered by the actor who is said to discover Magritte... I think it could have been done much more fresh and direct.
 
Belgium/France, 2009, 52 mins.

Watched on arte, June 4 2009. Repeats on 7/6, 17/6 and 22/6

http://www.arte.tv/fr/programmes/242,date=4/6/2009.html

Vurdering:

DOKU.ART 2 – Stanley Kubrick

For lovers of Stanley Kubrick – and who is not? – the festival programmes a documentary by British Jon Ronson, made for Channel 4’s True Stories, 48 minutes long. The text about the film and its background goes like this:

Stanley Kubrick’s meticulous, painstaking research periods in preparation for a new film project became legendary. As the years went by, the time between films grew longer and longer, and less and less films were made by the director. Meanwhile, the world was waiting for a new Stanley Kubrick movie. What on earth was he doing? When Kubrick died in 1999 he left behind thousands of boxes of archive material. His estate near London was filled with boxes containing Kubrick’s carefully documented life: scripts, research, correspondence, costumes, props, models, production schedules, photography, books and film equipment. Ronson takes us on a delightful and light-hearted stroll through Kubrick’s archive, seeking to understand the enigmatic director through the things he left behind, and by speaking to those closest to him. Ronson asks: is it possible to get to understand the man - and his extraordinary working methods - by looking through the vast number of boxes that remain after his death? With irony and at times burlesque details, this is the first documentary to open some of the boxes, starting a process of study that will keep film historians working for years.

http://www.doku-arts.com/2009/program/StanleyKubrick.html

DOKU.ARTS 1

Peter Kerekes: Doc on Cosmonauts

Gideon Koppel: Sleep Furiously

I do consider the film of Gideon Koppel as one of the most important in the last couple of years. It has been written about on filmkommentaren.dk several times (use the "search" button). I saw it on dvd in Lisbon and Copenhagen, and on a big screen with 1500 spectators at the Magnificent7 festival in Belgrade last January. With great joy I discover that the film has been released in UK cinemas with a (what else?) brilliant and positive review in The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw (May 29). Here is an excerpt:

This delicate, tonally complex film by Gideon Koppel is a documentary ove-letter to Trefeurig, the Welsh farming community in Ceredigion where he grew up, and where his parents found refuge from Nazi Germany during the second world war. It is a rural society, outwardly placid and at one with a landscape of stunning beauty, but in fact in crisis. Koppel's film takes as its starting point the closure of the local school, a definitive, calamitous loss for a place where shops and bus services have already vanished. The movie pays tribute to the grit of a people who may yet revive their economy, but it acknowledges a darker possibility, for which the sentimental note of an "elegy" is not appropriate. Slowly, but surely, Trefeurig appears to be dying, and Koppel's camera captures the consequent ripples of loss and regret.

The film has richness and an unshowy compassion, its grammar and pace adjusting to the tempo of the countryside. It reminds me of work by French film-makers such as Nicolas Philibert and Raymond Depardon, and the weird dance of the fork-lifts and farm machinery has something of Our Daily Bread, Nikolaus Geyrhalter's documentary about food production. But Sleep Furiously has its own distinctive quality...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/may/29/sleep-furiously-film-review

Vurdering:

Sunny Side of the Doc... 20 Years!

David Lynch

Innovative Lynch stands behind a new fascinating website film project that must appeal to all documentarians. According to RealScreen ” the online home of esteemed film director David Lynch will serve as a hub for 121 short documentary web films. The series, dubbed Interview Project, will feature a new episode every three days over the course of the next year. The films, produced through Lynch's production company Absurda Films, range from three to five minutes in length and were shot and edited by Lynch's son, Austin, and fellow filmmaker Jason S. They're the result of a road trip across the US in which the team found subjects through myriad ways: in bars, on highways, mowing their lawns.”

Check the site and watch the first episode launched yesterday, and hear what Lynch himself has to say about it.

http://interviewproject.davidlynch.com/www/#/about

http://www.realscreen.com/